Key Technology Progress of Plant-Protection UAVs Applied to Mountain Orchards: A Review

Abstract

With precision agriculture developing rapidly worldwide, water-saving, energy-saving, environment-friendly, and efficient agricultural production activities are effective ways to address human needs for agricultural products under the conditions of intensifying climate change, limited available arable land resources, and rapid population growth. Ground-based plant-protection machinery applied to large fields has difficulty solving the pest and disease prevention needs of mountain orchards since they feature undulating topography changes and low standardization of orchards. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have broad development prospects in pest control in mountain orchards because of their advantages of not being restricted by terrain, strong maneuverability, and hover ability. This paper reviews the recent development of plant-protection UAVs from three perspectives, i.e., positioning and navigation technology, flight attitude control technology, and route planning in mountain orchards. We highlight that the future research should focus on following technology development, including (1) positioning navigation technology with high positioning accuracy and strong anti-interference capability, (2) intelligent control technology with high dynamic stability and better calculation accuracy, and (3) the optimization of the route-planning algorithm covering multiple constraints and the cluster cooperative operation scheme of plant-protection UAVs applicable to mountain orchards. These reviewed results could provide a reference for the future development of plant-protection UAVs, which will become the focus of future research.

Spray performance of flexible shield canopy opener and rotor wind integrated boom‐sprayer application in soybean: effects on droplet deposition distribution

“…Second, increasing the ability to change trajectory and velocity. The method involves applying additional forces, such as gravity, airflow and electrostatic forces 35–38 …”

“…The method involves applying additional forces, such as gravity, airflow and electrostatic forces. [35][36][37][38] The conventional spraying mode has limited ability to direct droplets and cannot expand the droplet transport channel, which makes it unsuitable for pest and disease control in soybean crops with a dense canopy in the mid-to-late growth period. Therefore, some researchers choose to add an electrostatically assisted approach.…”

Applying IoT Sensors and Big Data to Improve Precision Crop Production: A Review

“…According to Neményi et al, 2022 [34], the combination of artificial intelligence and cloud computing constitutes a comprehensive support system for the IoT. It requires combining data from intelligent wireless sensors, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) [35] and satellites, data acquisition systems on agricultural machinery and crop production equipment, and robots such as unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), with precise positioning systems (such as navigation systems, real-time kinematics (RTK), and Lidar). The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a wireless network made up of geographically distributed sensor stations.…”

A Three-Dimensional Full-Coverage Operation Path Planning Method for Plant Protection Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Based on Energy Consumption Modeling

“…However, this mode of operation is susceptible to the influence of natural wind, increasing the degree of droplet drift, and cannot guarantee the effect of plant protection operations in the operation area at a lower altitude. Therefore, it is necessary to perform three-dimensional (3D) path planning [16] based on two-dimensional (2D) path planning to ensure the effectiveness of plant protection operations [17] and the safety of plant protection UAVs. In order to realize the affine 3D operation of plant protection UAVs, with the development of UAV technology and image recognition technology, the plant protection UAV operation method based on the heart of trees has attracted the attention of scholars because it can reduce the operating distance of plant protection UAVs [18].…”